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A Wizard of Earthsea
General Info Ged, the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, was called Sparrowhawk in his reckless youth. Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance. Series: Earthsea Cycle, Book 1 of 6 Publication Year: 1968 Goodreads Link Reading Group Activity Announcement Thread First Half Discussion Final Discussion Film Adaptations Earthsea mini series (2005) Tales from Earthsea animated film (2006) Tropes Explored Magical School Enemy Without About the Author Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She went to Radcliffe College and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and have three children and four grandchildren. Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children’s books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts. She has published seven books of poetry, twenty-two novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, twelve books for children, and four volumes of translation. Few American writers have done work of such high quality in so many forms. Most of Le Guin’s major titles have remained continuously in print, some for over forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the six Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings ''series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu’s ''Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise. Her poetry has drawn increasing critical interest; Finding My Elegy, published in 2012, contains poems selected from previous volumes and new work. (source) Known Influences "Taoist thought runs quite deep in the structure of many of my fictions." - Ursula Le Guin Q: Where did the idea of discovering 'true names' as a means to powerful magic come from? Do you know what fired you to include it in the Earthsea books as such a central theme? UKL: It's a very old idea in magic, all over the world. I read Lady Frazier's Leaves from the Golden Bough as a kid, and probably met it there. (source) Q: Where did the inspiration for the Earthsea stories come from - your politics, your imagination, or simply a need to tell a good story? UKL: I hate to admit it, but it came from a publisher. He asked me to write him a fantasy for "eleven up". Uh-oh, I never wrote for kids, I don't know how, I said. Then I went home, and thought about kids. Boys. How does a boy learn to be an old guy with a white beard who can do magic? - And there was my book. . . Come to think of it, Ged never did grow a beard. (source) Authors influenced by the book David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas) “I still have a precious memory of getting to the last page for the umpteenth time,” Mitchell has written, “and realising with a giddy clarity that being a goalkeeper or inventor or forester was yesterday’s news, and that I had to be a writer and nothing else would do. I yearned to do to other people what A Wizard of Earthsea had just done to me – even if I couldn’t articulate exactly what that was.” (source) Neil Gaiman “I learned from her the difference between Elfland and Poughkeepsie,” Gaiman continued, “and I learned when to use the language of one, and when to use the language of another.” He learned about the usage of language, and its intersection with issues of social justice and feminism. Starting out on Sandman, Gaiman began to ask himself, whenever a new character appeared: “Is there any reason why this character couldn’t be a woman? And if there was no reason, then they were. Life got easy.” Le Guin, Gaiman went on, “made me a better writer, and I think much more importantly, she made me a much better person who wrote.” (source) Fan Art A series of blog articles exploring cover and fan art of the Earthsea books over the years: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five